The lifting of heavy pieces of industrial equipment is a well known and never-ending problem, well known to those who have worked in large industrial plants. Over the years various devices have been developed to assist operators and maintenance workers in lifting chores and prevent back and other muscular-skeletal injuries. These prior art devices include overhead cranes, jib cranes, portable cranes, various kinds of floor jacks, and counterweighted and spring loaded beam-type supports. In recent years the development and use of larger and larger semiconductor substrates has caused the size of semiconductor processing equipment to increase. As the size of the equipment increases the weight of components which occasionally need to be removed for servicing also increases. However, unlike the common industrial plant where floor space is usually readily available or designed to accommodate particular serviceability and maintenance requirements, and where the shop environment is controlled at most by enclosing the machine in a building that has doors which can be closed, the semiconductor processing industry has for the most part already constructed and invested heavily in substrate processing facilities where the distance between the centerlines of adjacent equipment is fixed. Thus there is a fixed floor space, further the environment in rooms surrounding the semiconductor processing equipment is tightly controlled, and low to high grade clean rooms are sometimes surround the processing equipment. When larger sized equipment is installed in such facilities the tendency is to wedge the equipment in, thus narrowing the aisles between machine bays and reducing the space available in which a lift assisting device can be used. Further because of the cleanliness requirement the general practice is to avoid having any equipment items permanently positioned over an processing chamber, to avoid the possibility of dust or other particles which may have settled on such an object from being accidentally displaced, such that dust or particles fall in to an open processing chamber. This leaves the possibility of a portable jib crane, which is moved in and out of the clean room every time it is used, again increasing the chance of particle contamination. Another possibility is the use of a counterweight type device pivoting around a hinge point. In this arrangement there is no structure hanging over the processing chamber, however in this arrangement a counterweight would have to stick out into the space between processing chambers and further reduce the pathway available to process operators and service technicians.
A device which avoids the drawbacks of current devices and occupies only a small area is needed to effectively service the next generation of substrate processing machines which are being tightly fit into spaces previously intended for much smaller machines.